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12/02/2016

There is the smell of soy and earth, incense and mossy fingers wrapped between concrete. There are sidewalk gardens tended with delicate hands, a whispered push of broom against brick. The flutter of an open door resisting the wind.

I used to live here.

I used to know these smells and sounds, as I navigated this new place alone, far from the embrace of home. I let these smells and sounds hold me up when my 19 year old worry pulled me to the ground. Let them hold me up when the panic attacks came. When the rise of anxiety consumed my body like a wave, drowning my eyes with the salty burn of fear.

And I wondered if 25 years later the storm would still be there, waiting for me. Like a page left unturned in a story never finished.

I wondered if the door once closed would open again.

I can’t remember his name. But I remember his eyes.

Swollen as the rain ran down the side of the window in the train station. His eyes, held up inside a map of wrinkles that would take me places his heart couldn’t forget.

He leaned over his cane and reached for his wife’s hand. His eyes tipped as he came close and whispered.

My best friend lives in America.

He balanced on the soft, wooden handle as his body swayed between words.

We’ve been writing to each other every day for the past 40 years.

The sky stilled, clouds perched atop each word.

Every day.

For the past 40 years.

And I thought of each word, stroked under lamplight. Pressed between warm fingers. Stories from a day, a week, a moment remembered and set free. A tiny seed buried inside the ground nurturing the soil with its kindness, keeping his heart alive.

Sometimes kindness is a closed door. A place we forgot to look.

A vulnerability worth opening. And somewhere behind that closed door is a heart waiting to be seen. A heart waiting for the swell to soften and unfold, the salty eyes of hope waiting for its return.

Will you see me?

Will you see it all?

Kindness is a closed eye offering.

A door between vulnerability and courage waiting for us to step through.

A place of red skin rawness, shy of the open hand receipt.

A story told over and over again until it’s written behind our eyes, until it becomes the filter by which we see the world in front of us.

I see you.

I see.

All of you.

Turn the knob.

And sometimes I have to listen real hard. Drown out the beating of my own heart and step through the door knowing it may be too heavy to hold alone.

Because these doors have locks and there are keys gone missing for a lifetime.

Sometimes more.

And I thought there would always be time.

Time to find my way between the doors again.

Time to find my way between vulnerability and courage.

Find my way to this place where kindness holds you in its warmth.

So I hold on. I let go.

I step through and over and above.

What happens to a heart held inside the eyes of kindness?

And sometimes there is just a blank page.

The invisible ink hiding what needs to be seen.

And all we can do is rub our fingers across the page and feel for the place where the pen found the words, where it left its hard pressed story there for us to feel.

And it is there, in the winds rhythmic hymn.

The stream of incense pointing its smoky fingers towards the sky.

Questions answered with one gentle push.

Kindness finds you when the door is open.

Listen for its soft voice, whispering.

We arrived just as the rain began to fall.

Fog covered the mountains and slunk between the fields.

We stared down at the map thick with Japanese letters, lost in a sea of unknowns. A trickle of fear knocked as my heart raced.

She found us.

Her head tilted with concern.

Can I help you?

Can I help you find your way?

And it was her kindness, perched high above us with no words to translate.

Her kindness, unnamed, held us there.

Yes.

Please.

Don’t let go.

And her eyes. And the way she smiled just then. Like the morning sun just as it makes its way over the horizon for the first time.

Her finger found a blue line on the map caught between the crease.

This one.

This one will take you home.

Yes.

Please

Don’t let go.

There is no mark for love. Just as there is no mark for fear.

Just the invitation pushed under the door.

Waiting for you to open it.

And there is the temptation to push it back under the door. To give it back to the shadow that hides it.

Because fear takes residence.

Closes doors and throws locks into deep seas of shame.

Fear whispers,

Don’t trust.

Kindness is not real.

But it is kindness that frees us from hesitation.

Frees us from the roundabout wither of trust.

Heals us from the other side.

From the place where the door has stayed closed for too long.

And how many times have I held kindness at a distance, far enough away to watch it, observe it without ever fully knowing it.

And how many ways do these acts of kindness, these unseen swirls of the heart go unnoticed, unspoken. Never added to the horizon of worry and faltering trust.

Can I help you?

Yes.

Please.

Don't let go.

This one will take you home.

Because kindness is never lost. It waits on the wind.

Brought home by the lift of tears inside your eyes.

Kindness whispers,

There is nothing to fear.

Step through the door.

And don’t look back.

My swelling heart sees your swelling heart.

There is a voice behind the door.

And the sound of feet.

An invitation slid between shadows, pushed underneath by the girl I used to be. And the hand on the other side, still touching the wood, slowly finding the veins of time, the open knots of change, still wounded.

08/31/2015

The bedrooms smell like mothballs and it takes exactly 289 steps to reach the lake’s mossy shore. There’s a smudge where he pressed his hand against the glass to count the sleeping deer, quiet under the peeling bark of the tallest hickory.

Our hands are muddier. There is dirt under our nails and nightly scrubs. Our shoes have permanent rings of dark soil around their rubber soles, shoelaces embalmed in dried seaweed. I found a Styrofoam box of worms in the refrigerator, his muddy fingerprints wrapped around the lid.

The boys started school. There was Driver’s Ed and early morning arguments. Now there is soccer. We practice driving and I hold onto my seatbelt with both hands. The days of open page schedules have since passed. Their small eyes are bigger, wider. There is more searching, more stretching, more straying from my open hand and I thought maybe they had outgrown the joy of an afternoon wander.

And I can’t tell if time is moving faster or if I am moving slower. But it feels better. This presence. This awareness. This soiled knee, forest light mess is more beautiful than I remembered.

The apple tree is crooked. He hangs between the branches, holding tight to the place where a limb broke off and grew back.

Why don’t you take pictures anymore, mama? I miss you taking the pictures.

You do?

I do.

Me too.

There’s a video of him looking back at me. He was four and the coneflowers had grown taller than his small head. The video has no sound but I can hear his words through his waiting eyes.

I have places to take you, mama. Secret places.

Places where monsters lurk beneath the murky sea and dragon’s eyes rise between the leaves. And he ran past the trees until they weren’t trees at all, just the blur of a Sunday afternoon gone by too fast.

The previous owner said there is an asparagus patch that has been here for over 30 years. It still has the thin remnants of asparagus reaching for the sky and I wonder if they miss her hands.

Some of the flowers have begun to wither and I wonder if they forgot the way it felt to be in full bloom, if they miss it or if their dying leaves are a way to honor where they’ve been. The amount of time they spent parched inside the sun’s afternoon light, waiting for their thirst to be quenched.

We’re just growing, mama. Like the flowers and the trees.

There is the flower’s sweet invitation to take solace in her bloom. No concern over how her petals may fall, if there is a tear or the bitten remains of hunger. She stands alive in her own imperfection, more beautiful than before.

It can't grow again unless it dies first.

There is something new here, something rising from the end. Something caught and held, just for a moment. Made to be released. Something there all along, under the rain tossed shore, moving in and out between the soft underwater green, turning the water with its tail, the luminous glow of new skin receiving the light.

And there are demons, imagined and real, quiet and called upon, rising where we opened the sky and set them free. Twenty years brings softness to the eyes. And that story, the folded poem we carried between denim and skin left traces of ink we thought would mark our flesh forever. But that’s the thing about story and words and holding onto each syllable like it’s the air that is saving us from the underwater shore.

There is the moment you choose to lay them down, extinguish all the burning embers once and for all, never looking back even at the smoke still rising between the trees.

Because the rain will come if you let it.

There is a drawing of a new studio somewhere with lines erased and reimagined. My hands paint pictures with words, chapters and chapters of words. And there is something magical about writing without an end, letting a story unfold like an open mouth yawn finding rest.

And there are things close to my heart, not ready to share. And it feels like a whisper not yet fully a voice. So I am keeping it close hoping someday it will be strong enough to sing.

You gotta be quiet, mama or you’ll scare the fish.

Quiet gives voice to a heart with no pen.

And there is something honoring about being present with creation instead of documenting it. This quiet feels like standing still with your hands wide open letting the world find the creases between your fingers until you’re ready to close them again.

Can we stay a while longer, mama?

Sometimes love can look like silence. And voice can feel like rain.

There is a spin, some kind of centrifugal force, keeping us from entering this middle. This quiet, eye of the storm place, where the winds strength, its gust, carry our worries inside tornado swirl. And it's this same gust protecting us, holding us close to its center.

Because some change is fast like a tree torn from the ground, the windswept years, minutes, hours it took for those roots to grow deep enough to hold it all up, the branches and leaves, all reaching for the sky.

Other change is enduring, the unseen coil of memory and time, seeds thrown into the sky, searching for a place to land.

Sometimes you have to leave home to find home is you.

I held his pole when his line tangled. We drifted a little longer and dropped anchor after the sky turned orange. We reached into the water and felt the sunset wrap itself around our skin.

It feels softer now, mama.

And it looked like the water was rising up to meet the clouds with the tips of her waves. That maybe the storm was just the pull of the shore taking us home.

You gotta be patient, mama. It’ll come.

Just keep putting the line in the water.

Something will bite.

And I realize it's his voice keeping the sky blue just long enough to remember her color, trace the clouds so we might release them inside our hearts when the day swells gray and black.

Did you feel his skin, mama? The way the scales hold each other up?

There’s a smudge on the glass where your fingers pressed hello,

where you turned the last of the midnight rain into a heart that stretched into the sky.

07/21/2014

There is a sign in the yard that swings when the wind blows. We stood on the front porch and watched the clouds gather over the bent trees. I remembered the night the tornado hit several miles over the train tracks. He was close to eight months old, new teeth breaking through his tender gums. I rocked him back and forth inside my basket arms listening to the wind rise through the open window.

We ran down the stairs in the dark and he slept in my arms as we crouched on the basement floor, his eyes moving back and forth in tick tock dream. And I remember praying, writing words inside these walls, hoping that somehow they would hold us together.

The sky was achy and blue and he slid his hand inside mine.

“Are you sad, mama?”

He found a puddle and kissed it with the tip of his toe.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

His eyes lit from somewhere deep within, like a lighthouse making a turn towards the sea.

“Let’s go for an explore the way we used to.”

There is the path you used to run. All of the voices hidden between blades of grass, the laughter caught in each bend of leaf. A rustling beneath that shakes the seed from the tall grass still swaying.

And I thought of all the places we left footprints.

Where the grass got stuck between our toes and I thought about the house alone, quiet without the voices in hallways, wet mittens on floors.

The way leaves, loose from the hold of a tree can look like rain in the wind’s breath, a storm of hearts flying. A flower longing for hands to grasp its broken stem, to mend it with fingers laced.

You’ve grown on the shoulders of these days, lifted from yearbooks, dog eared diaries pressed between palms, hands made soft with time.

Something is being rewritten, still quiet and small, like sunshine before the rise just before it meets the horizon. This poem left out in the rain, words once pressed hard with imprint, now smeared by touch.

He is shy and his eyes are heavy. And I see the back of his head more, the sweeping curls of a boy who used to bring me frogs and toads and broken blue eggs pieced back together.

And I miss him already even though he’s still here.

High school doors will soon swallow him.

He walks with hands in pockets, protecting the contents from another day, the peripheral glance back to something forgotten, lingering somewhere behind his eyes.

Handles broken off in the places where I used to hold on.

His slippery heart moving in and out, like the sun’s woody pattern on a summer’s path. This intermittent hello lost, this blink between man and boy.

It was the way he carried himself, shoulders bent like a broken gate unhinged. His hair soaked in an elder fog.

And maybe I will always remember this day as that time, that last time he let me see inside his window eyes before the curtains were drawn.

Or maybe I will remember the way these same eyes grew forests with their light.

“Can I hold your hand?”

Can I feel all of the words still hanging in your heart like flowers left to dry.

Sometimes we need to talk even when there is nothing to say.

This thunder behind a cloud, brimming with strength and voice. Notes drawn on a page, the music never played, hummed over the cattails swaying.

And we’ll open a window, and listen for a far away train going somewhere, the soft horn of arrival and departure. Follow me. Anywhere. Somewhere. And the trail of smoke curling around cities, the places you’ll go.

This story has new pages where my words have been erased and rewritten in the quiet places between the lines. Where my words have grown smaller, pages still blank with life.

Open the skies.

These words feel like falling rain.

Skin raw under these first new drops. Soaking into the cracked walls of thinning grass and the pale remnants of summer.

“I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

The way a story can be heard crying for release under a stack of heavy books.

The stone paper, soaking up each turned corner cursive stroke. To know it’s still there, the voice behind the eyes, the rumbling under the forest bark, the roots shaking with power and strength, waiting to be released.

I can hear the words spoken somewhere between flannel pajama bottoms and loose teeth under pillows, all the places where the roots have been pulled from the ground.

And the words follow us like a kite dragged over the dusty ground, waiting for the wind lift it again.

“Do you remember the bird?”

The one that found it’s way in through an open door. The way it flew around for hours, hovering above the couch, landing on tables and crashing into windows, trying to find its way out, until finally, he landed on the rough stone fireplace. His small chest moving up and down, his tiny heart beating so fast. And we tried to move him, tried to get him to crawl inside a small bucket so we could set him free. But he wouldn’t move. His tiny toes curled around the brown stone, holding on. It died, holding on. And the next morning, we buried him in the yard. You cried. You held his small wings in your hand and you cried.

“He wouldn’t let go, mama. He wouldn’t let go.”

Sometimes you have to let things go in order to be free.

And this is what it will feel like.

Like the wind under a broken leaf, set free.

Like a door rising from the dirt ground, loosened.

You are my words. Each deep breath pulled close to my ear. Your cry caught in the gentle twirl of a black cat’s tail and her quiet meow with eyes asking.

“Can we play?”

The house is empty.

I thought we’d have more time.

All of the words, still silent, waiting behind walls crumbling.

There is a passage, an underground tunnel of time, unseen, like a man quietly holding his suitcase walking towards the tunnel’s open end, a halo's light welcome.

There is the surface in hand, the belongings of a life collected and put down, only to be watched from a distance, this sail being lifted and pray for calm seas.

Sometimes all we can do is try. And I have to be reminded of how this thing works. This salty tear, feet bathed in dirt, thing.

“Just try.”

Because, you can’t hold on.

Grace comes in the early morning hours before the light has a chance to grow hard. These whispers between leaves, caught between steps, forgiveness rising on the wings of feathers stretched, the mourning dove’s last cry.

This fragile tree place where the slightest shift in wind can tear at a newly forming leaf, where I pray the roots were made strong enough for these winds of change, this heartache grown from stretch, the vine wrapped and pulled, stretching towards the light where a small seed blooms.

And the deep breath of the thirsty paper quenched by a liquid brush. Take me somewhere. Anywhere.

These words spoken for the first time, the shell cracked, pieces falling to the floor in puddle of ink and spoken watercolor words. Stroke upon stroke, until something luminous and holy shines through.

01/15/2014

His eyes lifted into the milky glow of the frosted window as he pulled on the broken strap hanging from his backpack.

It has nowhere to go.

The stoplight sank and weaved against the gentle wind, its red eye winking between bends. And the car filled with the kind of quiet that happens only after a morning rush.

It just follows the wind.

His small voice left cracks in the glass.

Sometimes it moves straight down, and sometimes it stays awhile, just floating, wandering a bit.

The green light pulled us forward.

There is this quiet space without words, just wind. Where there is no hanging on, just flight. Without outcome, just grace.

Do you remember the bird?

The one caught in the garage between the beach chairs and the cans of paint? Its small chest pulling for breath, the deep reach of want, the carnal thunder of a race still running.

And I thought about the pull, the tug to be right, to be made well, to be made known.

And I thought about the wings that flap so hard, trying. Trying.

Trying to make the wind.

The snowflakes kept falling, straight, then bent, coming to the ground shaken and soft. And the gentle landing, blessed by the wind, by the snowflakes already arrived, blanketing the hard ground below.

12/12/2013

The ones I remembered. The ones that used to hang in the hallway just outside my bedroom door, somewhere between my name carved in the dense, cabin wood and the collage you made from torn magazine pages. And there, between the hardened glue, yellowing with time, a movement of women caught on film, dusty gray words still smoldering. 1976. Women. Liberation. Awaken. And one girl, in the corner of the page, chrome soaked hair, bare muscles flexed, open mouth scream, silenced behind the glass.

And some days, I would sit under your collage and read each word, search inside its heavy frame. I wondered if those pictures were what freedom looked like. If bravery was an arm lifted into the sky, like a wing searching for its wind. Or if bravery was a tear tracing the journey of a young girl over cheek rouged with fight. And I could almost hear your voice trying to get out from behind the glass.

And I think I fell in love with you, right then, right there, under your heart cut out before my eyes.

And the girl in the pictures, spread out on my table, with her hand, forty-two years held, was scared. I remember the day I sat with you and took these pictures. The studio was cold, shoulders bent to protect the bare skin above my tank top, raw with exposure, small hands pulling a tiny string from the unraveling elastic. There was the white light piercing my eyes, long shadows asleep on the floor. You had trimmed my bangs the night before as I sat at your knees and felt your finger hold the hair between skin and blade.

And I realized I never take pictures of you.

It was your birthday and the clouds moved fast, pushing a storm through the trees. And all I wanted was to take your picture, give you proof of your beauty. Not beauty seen from the surface, hair caught in iron pressed, skin pulled beauty. But the deep, hiding place in your eyes, beauty.

Because when you photograph someone, you are holding their most gentle place inside your eyes. And it takes trust and vulnerability to allow this wild forest place to be seen.

And sometimes you just need to remember someone without all of the years attached.

Sometimes bravery is an unraveling string, held inside the smallest hands.

And I found you on this day, camera in my hand, the sun just beginning to give in to winter’s persuasive winds, the way the air felt thinner and your skin went translucent in the watered down blue sky.

A whisper. Let this be sacred.

And I thought about all of the days, the minutes tied in knots, with your hand over mine, guiding the fabric through the sewing machine’s open mouth, needle plunging up and down, sinking into the pattern’s inky guides.

Your hand holding mine, as it held a mixer for the first time, peanut butter thick against the bowl’s milky sides. Your fingers weaved between mine, pressing crisscross, fork patterns into the rolled dough balls.

And I could hear you raking through the open window, the scrape of rusty metal fingers on the concrete ground. He was working an extra shift at the steel mill and the water on the stove had boiled over.

I could see you through my mirror, the reflection of you in the backyard, knee deep in periwinkle hold as you pulled and placed, reviving each sunken plant, reborn.

And I watched you grow a company on the basement’s concrete floor. Homemade silk screens exposed, letting the light open each place where the paint would sneak through, creating fabric soaked in courage. And the quiet drag of feet on hardwood stairs after the light sank past midnight’s last wave.

I watched you walk into trucking companies, alone, sales pitch neatly scribed on your chalkboard heart, smeared and rewritten over and over again.

And I remember the moment you let go of my hand and pushed the lock down on the car door. The soft wisp of curled hair over your eyes, as you took your last breath before turning and walking away.

“I’ll be right back.”

You were brave, mom.

And it was your voice on the phone the first time I really missed home. I was living in Japan and the streetlight was out as I stood in the shadow of the closed grocery store. And you told me I would be ok. You told me you loved me.

And the neon light flickered long enough to find more coins.

And your voice was a tunnel home, the silence between your words, an open door.

And maybe you don’t know, but I have an entire part of my heart dedicated completely to the memories of each and every time you ever held my hand or stroked my hair, hugged me or told me, “It’s going to be ok.”

You were brave, mom.

And I could feel my heart wanting to run back to you, to the hand on my hand, guiding me.

And your eyes tell me you tried.

And isn’t that all I can ask for, for someone to try, to stumble around me long enough to find an open door in the murky stream of growth.

Those are the brave ones, courage strung over shoulder marching into the depths of wet eyes wandering. And there is no place to hide inside these wet eyes, hope and dream awash in the cold, raw light, exposed.

Because even the most tightly woven masks require holes to see, a place where light can get in, the place inside that can never be covered, where the paint can get through, coloring over the darkest lines.

And when I look at those pictures, I can see all the places where you were scared just like me, where maybe you worried a worn path around your heart.

I used to write poems for you and hide them in my drawers. Sometimes I would drawer flowers around the words. I waited for your soft whisper inside those petals, still closed.

“I’m scared too.”

Because somewhere I lost my voice, there in the dark forest walk, caught between snare and thorn, like a toy misplaced, under a swing, drown inside the storm’s wet stream. And I needed your hands to help me search, to tear apart the leaves, the deep tree roots holding it all together.

And I was so scared. I hid it all, every sound and small whisper, until it was choked from my heart, the torn vessels that pumped blood to my most tender places.

And I couldn’t find your eyes back home.

I travelled far from this swing set, from your hand lifting me into the sky, where it felt like wings set free. And all the places I went seeking your eyes on my heart.

I just wanted someone to make it all better, to fill in all of the cracks and put all of the broken pieces back together, the parts of myself left strewn under the tallest trees.

Sometimes, something lives in us so long we can’t remember when we ever agreed to its inhabitance under its rusty nail hold.

And I prayed. I prayed your skin and bone and bent finger hands knew how to put it back together.

This love looks like resurrection, like skin torn from the bone. And the holy voice that speaks.

“This is not over.”

This grace is the face of love.

And being a mama aches as much as it opens.

And I can see the girl woman who gave up so much of herself just so I would know what mama hands felt like wrapped around my heart.

I am 42, and you, you are some years past, and I have travelled paths away from you, around you and back to these hands I remember. Still open. Waiting at the door. And some days, now, I can look into your eyes and recognize your maps. Each street and valley low, some flooded with tears, some torn, never to be travelled again. And I can find myself there. Your paths, your streets, your milky stars connected.

And some days, I want to invite you into mine. Let you walk a bit through the dark forests I hid from you.

Let you hold the seed on the back of the wind, this small girl voice held tightly in your hand.

And this prodigal daughter, returning home, born from a heart drawn in bravery.

I found you here, mom.

I found your beauty. Not from being understood, but from the delicate place of understanding. Not from seeing, but from allowing my heart to be seen.

And I don’t want to wait.

Because there are all of the things telling us life is sacred. The health scares, the pause just before the doctor leans in and speaks, the rush of heat on skin as he darts out of my hand, as the car's brakes cry a little louder, the red light turned green, then yellow. The instant caught. Then gone from our hands, escaping into the open sky.

And this voice feels like blood just beneath the skin, rising to the cut. I want to tell you now because when you finally realize that beauty is the tender, the ordinary, the day after day, the hands held, the warmth of the sun that lifts a weary heart, you want nothing more than to shine a light on it.

And I can hear you, your voice behind the glass flying out beyond the stars.

I’d never taken a picture of you.

And all I really wanted was to give you a birthday gift. But it was you that ended up giving me the gift. And what I got was your eyes.

11/21/2013

He had a sore throat. So I pulled his blanket up around his neck, letting his small eyes peer over the edge of cotton and down feather escape.

“It hurts.”

“I know.”

I found the top of his head where my kiss wouldn’t get lost, somewhere between his ruffled eyebrow and the skyscrapers of tousled hair. And I let my mother hands pull his blanket around each leg, smoothing the parts of him still wrinkled.

And I followed him with my eyes, until all that remained was the top of his head rising from the back of the couch like a noon day sunset of brunette.

And somewhere a voice.

“Is my throat broken?”

Rest.

Cave into the muffled insulation of closed eyes. This view from under the blanket, where eyes are made softer by the screen of bright light and the silence of outside voices.

Sometimes we have to let our voice rest.

Let the cavernous hold of time wrap fingers around our words. Let our heart listen again to the deep voice of spirit and wind.

And there’s this shift here, an opening and grafting into some kind of deep reservoir of hope, the hollowed out place that waits to be filled.

“Why does it hurt so much?”

Maybe your voice just needs to heal.

Because somewhere deep inside there is a beautiful song playing,leaving you breathless in its wake.

Or maybe it just hurts.

And we have to let go, the clutch and swell of some age old idea that got knit between the beautiful weave of your heart, like some kind of random string pulled, left to dangle over an open hole.

We’re given these open wound moments, these glass on the floor moments.

And it feels like a lost breath caught in the net of sorrow. Released.

A hand reaching from beneath the tidal swirl. And this. Our first breath above water.

And there, inside the net held close, somewhere between eye and heart, found.

This broken winged bird set free.

There is something beautiful caught inside the wind.

Something being made new again.

And it feels like an open mouth horizon breathing a sunrise over these newly calmed seas.

And the day feels fiery and light. Burnt edges still smoldering.

And this reckoning, this place where each wound, each whisper, each small heart is tooled and carved. Remembered.

This is the place where the heart is made new. Again.

And again.

And again.

“Is it broken?”

You are not broken.

You have loved well.You have spoken grace when the wind’s voice pushed your sail.

You are not broken.

Only worn by the sea mists salty tongue.

And all of the ways we make ourselves small, the wrongs pooled inside the deep crevice holes. Broke open and released. These small waves grown inside the wind’s tuck and white capped kiss.

You are not broken.

You are made new.

He walked into the studio, blanket still wrapped, collecting bits of paper along its tired edge.

“You’ve made something new.”

He held my hand and we named the day, an offering for the patchwork of wide stitches holding us together.

11/19/2012

The light moved fast, painting shadows over the faded green field. There was the last cold kiss of a
regular Tuesday and my hands cupped his fingers as his feet swept the frosted
field. There was the crack of branch and swing of arms and the quick break of
fingers falling apart from the nest of palm and thumb. And there was the race
to the pond, the sound of nylon scratching with each stride and his small chirp
of discovery.

The air was still and we made small waves with our hum and breath. The abandoned cities of cattails and tall bent grasses opened doors and windows to mark our return. And the quiet light sent secret messages only our hearts could hear.

And there was a yawn in the bend of his hand, a hollowed out center that yearned to be thread with the quiet presence of love and her melodic song.

And it was his small fingers inside my hand, the pulse under his nails, the criss cross veins running alongside my worn wrinkles that told me to listen.

The red winged blackbirds were gone. The ones that dove under deep blue skies and sang in urgency as we moved around the nests once filled with egg and chick.

And her voice, the one hidden behind thunder, the warning that rumbles behind the protective mama heart, telling the rain just where to land. She was there, in the shadow of fall, under winter's restless light. She whispered. This is home.

She said she needed words. Something that could line the inside of her coat on winter days, when the light felt broken and dim. And there was some kind of respite in her wings, a hiding place from all of the feeling and hurting. And her feathers were lined with dust, the kind that came from uncovering secrets.

Sometimes the light can bend in a certain direction, turning all of the leaves into wings, the branches into bare, naked limbs reaching for the nearest cloud. And there, when the light is just right, I can see the outline of her nest, still warm with memory.

These fingers entwined, these moments engrained, are the intricate weaving of her smile, her eyes bright with hello, a dangling paintbrush between two loose fingers. It is the faint breath between twig and leaf, the protection and warmth seated in the depth of her hold.

He held the nest close and lifted a leaf from its center.

"It's made from all that remains, the stuff left behind. A shoelace or wrapper from some old gum. A broken piece of grass or ribbon left in the rain. Bits of paper and mud. It's all here. Inside this little nest. Nothing is forgotten."

And her love feels like the wind blowing even when the windows are closed.

And there are the times I feel most alone in the forest, when I can no longer identify specie or skin, when the smell of grass is dull and the bark no longer a pattern to follow. When my eyes are closed and the caves covered with doors of boulder and stone.

"Will you hold my hand?"

And her words of love, the ones she wrote on the insides of her fingers, so when our hands met, I could feel her story told between my thumb and the curve of her nail. These words are my ladder to this place you call home.

"Will you hold my hand?"

"I already am."

And I can hear her quiet song on the flutter of a bird's wing, carrying away the worry, the fear, the small voices caught in nets. And the place she wrote her story still remains on these hands, each vein a path past grown wrinkles and tree lined fingertips, each holding a nest from their wiry bends.

And her heart, the one that shines each time a leaf lifts in a breeze. Her heart, entwined in the deepest part of this nest, rests with each rise and fall of breath.

So I move things around, make a space for the cutting and grafting, the weaving and stitching, the building of nest and home. So these moments, woven in love, the curl of her hair, the way her eyes filled with tears just before she laughed, the way her voice paused before exclamation, the way the light would soak up her motherhood just so it could shine. I will place you here. Forever.

And I remember the hands that cradled this wreck of a girl with one, curled lash wink, the way love can sometimes feel like a leap, a dance over hot stone ash.

And the fragile walk through dark forests, searching, while your hands lift me over thorn and brush. And there you are, making friends with the moon, smiling over a bent sunset, pushing its warm blanket over our skin. And your song, the fingers tucking in each loose corner.

And to find love perched, held between breaths, enough time for my eyes to fill with tears. Sometimes all I can see are the lashes under her eyes, all of the wishes set loose on the wind, and the sunset when the waves were so loud we had to yell over their roars.

I will place you here. Between the dew of this one morning and the crest of this fallen night. Your love thread between wrapper and twig, damp clay and fallen hair. Between the bend of my finger and the joint of his hand. In the motherhood I forgot to own and the friendship I carry in the smallest pocket of my heart, this nest,

made from all that remains.

*And a film made during the creation of this shadowbox, filmed by the lovely, Lara Vagenius. Thank you, beautiful girl.